Here’s a scary statistic from 2008 – we waste about a pound of food per person per day[3]. Certainly not all of that is traced back to a person actually tossing out a pound of food, much of it is attributed to grocery stores and restaurants, but we all know the feeling of discovering moldy food in the back corner of our refrigerators. It’s a classic case of a money leak… fortunately we discovered one solution that has worked for us.

The best thing we’ve done to combat spoiling food is using a leftover calendar[5]. We write down what we put into our fridge on the calendar, then we use it to help us decide what we’re going to eat. As items are consumed, we cross them off the calendar. This leaves us with essentially a list of all the leftovers in our fridge, which means we don’t need to waste electricity rooting around in the back looking for something that might not even be there.

When we implemented the calendar, it drastically cut down how much food we were throwing out. While we do discover the occasional “bag of cheese” we forgot about (things like that don’t make the calendar), we haven’t discarded anything substantial in terms of food in a long time.